Ethereum is overpriced garbage

There’s been a lot of buzz about a cryptocurrency called Ethereum (ETH) potentially replacing Bitcoin. While Ethereum may indeed soon temporarily overtake Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization, it will never replace Bitcoin.

If you’re an Ethereum fanboy or even just considering “investing” in this presently overpriced (ETH is $270 currently) garbage then please stick around and allow me to illuminate you.

-Market capitalization-

For starters, should Ethereum’s market capitalization ever surpass Bitcoin’s this would NOT mean that the Ethereum price would come anywhere near the Bitcoin price. Observe:

So here’s what Ethereum’s price per ETH would be with a $45 billion market cap, a market cap slightly larger than BTC’s: $484.10.

So for ETH to be the same price as BTC is right now, Ethereum would need a market cap of $225 billion. I’m not saying that a market cap that high is impossible for ETH to ever reach, but I really doubt it ever climbs half that high for reasons that I’m about to explain.

By the way, did you know that technically Ethereum isn’t even a currency? It’s just a token used to run various computations on a decentralized virtual machine. If BTC is digital cash, ETH is digital “gas”.

-Ethereum is ultimately irrelevant-

So ETH’s current market cap of $25 billion means that collectively the human race has $25 billion set aside purely to run these scripts called “smart contracts” on this special decentralized virtual computer. If decentralized virtual computing is what gets you excited, just go build yourself a server cluster. Can you imagine the totally sweet server cluster that could be powered, maintained, and connected through hundreds of separate locations around the globe for $25 billion? Ethereum’s more realistic market cap should be something around $1 billion but honestly even $1 billion feels too generous. Too generous because I have yet to encounter a single real world use for Ethereum smart contracts that regular scripting/programing and cluster hosting is unable do MUCH better already. A single cluster hosted across multiple locations would provide perpetual uptime. Rather than be limited to “smart contracts” that must be written in Ethereum’s home grown scripting language called “solidity” you can write your code in whatever language you please. Compile yourself a true decentralized app, not a bunch of scripts written in pseudo-javascript that the ETH crowd tries to pass off as the same thing.

So if anyone reading this has any suspected real world uses for ETH/smart contracts that might outdo technologies that already exist and are prevalent, I’d love for you to share it with me in the comments below. I honestly can’t think of a single one right now, can you?

ETH fanboys will almost always answer the “what’s a real world function/use that ETH smart contracts can fulfill better than other existing technologies?” question by giving the obvious “it’s still the very early days” as a deflecting non-answer but seriously IF NONE OF US ARE ABLE TO FIND A SINGLE TASK THAT ETHEREUM COULD POTENTIALLY DO BETTER THAN WHAT’S ALREADY OUT THERE THEN ETHEREUM IS ULTIMATELY IRRELEVANT.

I totally get that turning a blockchain into a decentralized virtual computer is completely amazing because I’m in full agreement: it is amazing. No sarcasm, from the first time I read about it and even to this day I feel a bit of amazement at just how wild that concept is. Problem is there doesn’t seem to be any real world utility for it that isn’t already being fulfilled by more powerful/flexible/cheap/readily available technologies that’ve been around longer. It’s like the blockchain equivalent of “cool trick bro.” It really is a cool trick, really truly, too bad its also almost completely impotent when lined up with any similar technology solutions.

So if you love ETH and find yourself fighting the good voice of reason here then comfort yourself from these painful points by knowing that I have little doubt ETH will continue to increase in value a while longer (people are stupid after all), so please enjoy the ride while you can. Once some of those heavy ETH holders understand some of the simple points I’m making here (which will be inevitable once all the hype and press dies down and people actually start looking at it more closely), the ETH bubble is going to pop and pop hard. It’s inevitable because ETH revolutionizes nothing, there’s nothing truly helpful being added to the world by its use or creation.

Marcus has worked for the better part of the past two decades as an IT Systems Administrator. Throughout his life he's been fascinated by finance and hopes the creation of cryptocurrency heralds a new era where banks, governments and centralized institutions lose their strangle-hold upon the citizenry's financial health and welfare.

4 Replies to “Ethereum is overpriced garbage”

Regarding your statement: “Ethereum is ultimately irrelevant” have you taken into consideration what numerai is doing and has done already? To call even that one application of ethereum irrelevant, let alone all of the possible applications, doesn’t seem very thoughtful.

Jackson, you’re right it isn’t very thoughtful of me but it also isn’t thoughtless either. I admit I don’t know everything and that there might be some real world use cases for it where it’s able to perform a job better than the tech we already have available, I just haven’t been able to find any examples yet and I don’t think that Numerai or its objectives fulfills that either.

Many of the large financial companies like Goldman Sachs already have their own proprietary version of AI connected to various exchanges, executing hundreds or thousands of trades per second. The main thing that I’m saying in my original post is that decentralization is nothing new. Virtualization is also nothing new. Ethereum’s gimmick is that it’s using a blockchain to run a decentralized virtual machine (VM) that can only execute smart contracts, yet we have actual decentralized VMs out there that run much more than just smart contracts or javascript- in fact it would be really bizarre for a systems architect to limit a VM’s functionality with such a boundary.

What Ethereum managed to do with running smart contracts off of a blockchain is mindblowing, it really is. The only problem is that so far everything it can do, existing technology can do better. That’s why I say it’s irrelevant.